Winston Churchill, Anti-German Hate Group Leader

(Prime Minister Theresa May meeting US President Donald Trump by a bust of Sir Winston Churchill in the Oval Office of the White House, Washington DC, January 27, 2017. Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire)

What if World War II had been reported the way the establishment media writes about the global jihad today? The question is pertinent in light of the ongoing demonization of Trump adviser Steven K. Bannon, who is now being vilified by establishment media for a ten-year-old unproduced film project discussing the jihad threat.

Matea Gold of the Washington Post described the film in lurid terms:

The flag fluttering above the U.S. Capitol is emblazoned with a crescent and star. Chants of “Allahu Akbar” rise from inside the building.

That’s the provocative opening scene of a documentary-style movie outlined 10 years ago by Stephen K. Bannon that envisioned radical Muslims taking over the country and remaking it into the “Islamic States of America,” according to a document describing the project obtained by The Washington Post.

Hate-mongering! Fear-mongering!

Right?

Well, Matea Gold didn’t bother to ask Omar Ahmad what he thought of this. Ahmad, the cofounder and long-time board chairman of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), once said:

Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth.

Ahmad now denies saying those words, but the original reporter still stands by her story. And CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper once said:

I wouldn’t want to create the impression that I wouldn’t like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future.

Meanwhile, according to a captured internal document, the Muslim Brotherhood (to which all major Muslim groups in the U.S. are linked) is dedicated to:

… eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within, and sabotaging its miserable house … so that it falls, and Allah’s religion is victorious over other religions.

Gold mentions none of this. Steve Bannon actually did his homework, and for this he is described as a bigoted Islamophobe.

Gold adds:

The proposal names two dozen conservative writers and terrorism experts who could serve as potential on-screen guests, including Robert Spencer, director of the Jihad Watch website, who is labeled by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-Muslim “propagandist.”

Am I, now?

Imagine if this were 1930, and the Southern Poverty Law Center existed, and it issued a lavishly illustrated, meticulously “documented” report on critics of the Nazis, dubbing them “anti-German hate group leaders.”

They would include profiles of Winston Churchill, Edgar Mowrer, and other early critics of Hitler, noting when each had made false claims about Hitler — false, that is, according to the Nazis — and charging them with “hate” and “anti-German bias.”

Imagine if the mainstream media, whenever it quoted Churchill, Mowrer, or the others, described them as “anti-German,” and noted that the Southern Poverty Law Center said they were hate-group leaders. They would call them “rabble rousers” and “demogogues.” Quotes from Goebbels and Göring would invariably be included, calmly explaining the truth, and patiently answering questions about what a shame it was that they had to deal with the likes of Churchill.

This kind of coverage would be universal: critics of Nazism would never described in the mainstream media in anything but pejorative terms. Whenever they receive media attention, they would be challenged to respond to charges that they were “anti-German” and “spreading hate.” Their views would more often be presented by the SPLC, and others who dubbed them “anti-German,” than by themselves.

The leading authorities the media consulted about Hitler and Nazism would be favorable to both, and opposed only to excessive violence by the Brownshirts, which they describe as inconsistent with the spirit of Nazism. Meanwhile, the critics would be constantly vilified, ridiculed, and likened to the Ku Klux Klan and other genuinely hateful groups. People would write that they wanted to attack them physically, and that it would be legitimate to do so.

Imagine that this situation prevailed, without any cracks in the edifice, for five years. Ten years. Fifteen years.

Imagine that it prevailed as Hitler came to power, as he began persecuting the Jews, as he began his rearmament of Germany, as he bullied weak Western leaders, who were anxious to appease him anyway, into allowing him to take Austria and Czechoslovakia, and finally as he invaded Poland and the Western powers finally decided to fight back.

Imagine that every step Britain, France, and ultimately the Soviet Union and the United States took to defend themselves against Hitler and the Nazis was decried by the mainstream media and a huge segment of the American public as “anti-German,” as a manifestation of hatred and bigotry. If every step FDR took to prosecute the war was denounced and even voided by federal court orders; if he was derided as a fool, a criminal, an authoritarian ruler, and there were open calls not only for his impeachment, but for a coup to remove him from power, and even numerous calls for his assassination.